Photographs by Lewis Carroll of the real-life Alice in Wonderland went on public display for the first time yesterday - but not in the National Portrait Gallery in London, or the National Photography Museum in Bradford, the organisations which jointly raised £350,000 last year to save the images from export to the United States.

Instead they are on show in a new gallery created by the National Portrait Gallery at Bodelwyddan Castle, near Rhyl in north Wales, where they hang with other stars from the portrait collection including Julian Opie's pictures of Blur, Andrew Tift's of Neil and Glenys Kinnock, and John Everett Millais's of Louise Jopling.

Lewis Carroll is regarded as a pioneering photographer as well as the creator of one of the most famous children's books ever written.

The pictures on display include the only one he ever took which included Alice Liddell's brother, Harry. If Carroll had taken to Harry, the history of literature might have been different. Instead he said: "I am fond of children, except boys. To me they are not an attractive race of beings."

The National Portrait Gallery's director, Sandy Nairne, promised a dramatic expansion of the gallery's nationwide loans.

"Why not show Lewis Carroll's photos here first?" he asked. "St Martin's Place and Bradford can wait. We will share the best of the collection."

The Welsh gallery, where the NPG will mount several exhibitions every year, has been designed by Muf architects in the first floor rooms of what was once a modest 17th century country house, transformed a century ago into a castle.

The house became a girls' boarding school before being bought by the local authority 20 years ago, but came to the brink of bankruptcy in the 1990s as visitor numbers and grant support plunged.

The castle was saved partly as an indirect result of the death of the Princess of Wales. The NPG lent it Brian Organ's portrait of Diana, and her step-grandmother, Dame Barbara Cartland, did the rest, writing letters to the papers denouncing the scandal of the portrait being smuggled out of London. Visitor numbers shot up and remain healthy.